to use the same five or six
locations they’re using in every
movie within that window of
time. The town square that
they use in Inherit the Wind,
Bye Bye Birdie, to
Back to the Future. We mim-
icked that in our movie so that
it would look like we had this
Twilight Zone-esque TV show
feel, like it was being shot
on the backlot of Hollywood
50 years ago.
People would go, now wait
a minute, that’s not what
houses look like in southern
New Mexico—we know. It’s
not what houses look like in
Mississippi; it’s not what hous-
es look like in West Virginia;
it’s not what houses look like
in Indiana. But if you watched
the movies between like 1945
and 1965, they all look like that.
Hitchcock movies look a whole
lot like other movies from that
era because they were all using
the same sets. We wanted our
movie to look like we were
stuck with those limitations.
I always want the actor
to come into a scene with a pre-
ferred approach, and then we
work together for it to become
something more than they
could have reached on their
own, ideally—otherwise, why do
they need a director? The worst
idea is to make them feel like
what they brought was wrong—
it’s not quite wrong, ever. Can I
find something that’s closer to a
realistic experience the charac-
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INTERVIEW LOCAL
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RADIO LISTENER CALLS TO
HELP GET TO THE BOTTOM OF
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SMALL NEW MEXICO TOWN IN
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ter would be having right here?
And so yes, sometimes the first
approach by the actor would be
off, and I would let them have
a handful of those takes, and
then you know that you want
to get the actor from A to Z.
You don’t do that by giving
them 16 characters of the alpha-
bet to get halfway there. You
give them one, and then you
give them another two, maybe.
And then over the course of
maybe eight or nine takes,
there is Z, without them even
necessarily realizing how we
got them there. I think visually:If they’re on a low note on the
piano, and you want them on a
high note? You move them up
slowly. It’s a dynamic that we’re
working through together.
The way we were able to
craft the performances to where
I was super pleased with them
was by not having extra cover-
age. There was one scene that
was six pages that I shot in 15
seconds. And I remember my
DP understanding, “OK, now
I see how we’re going to get
through this movie.” It’s the
scene where four characters de-
scend on the middle of town, allat once, and they all talk on top
of each other—that’s six pages.
I cared more about the tone of
what was happening in that
moment in the narrative than
I did about each character get-
ting their turn with their own
close up and reverse shot which
would have taken a whole night
to shoot—it would have taken
12 hours. So how I got around
some of the limitations that
indie movies have was, “Okay,
how do we do this? How do we
prep this in a way that lets me
have a one shot I want, rather
than the one shot plusHOW THEY DID IT